There is nothing wrong with wanting to look your best, especially in your pictures. After all, we live in the age of social media and nearly unrealistic beauty standards, that is why every headshot we post is meticulously examined. So if you want to maintain your image as an in-control-of-everything person, you need to slightly up your retouching game. So here are the easiest ways you can improve almost any of your portrait pictures.
1. Crop Your Image
Unexpectedly, we’ll be starting not with a retouching tip, but with a more basic post-processing one. Why? Well, because if your portrait isn’t composed well, people will only glance at it briefly and forget that they ever saw that. Even if you look nearly flawless in it. So if you want your image to grasp viewers’ attention, you need to crop it to improve its composition. To do that, use cropping guidelines like the Rule of Thirds of the Golden Ratio. You’ll see – these seemingly simple cropping grids can do wonders in terms of shifting the focus of your image.
2. Make Your Eyes Glow
Now we move onto more specific tips. Since the eyes are the most expressive (and sometimes the most beautiful) part of one’s face, we need to make sure they are striking. That’s why a little trick of making the white whiter goes a long way. So do not skip this seemingly unnecessary step and paint your whites a bit whiter to make your eyes really stand out. Just try not to overdo, otherwise, you’ll end up looking like a Barbie doll.
3. Smooth Your Skin – But Only a Little
We all want flawless looking skin, bur we don’t want to be ‘fake’ and appear to be hiding our natural beauty. However, if you want a photo for professional purposes, you can lightly ease wrinkles, acne, dark spots – any blemishes that happen to plague your skin at the moment of the photoshoot. Once again, try to make the edits delicate and subtle. You don’t want to turn into a plastic doll with a suspiciously smooth face.
4. Add Depth to Your Face
Sometimes due to bad lighting or an unflattering angle, you end up with a face that looks like a mask. But there is a solution to this flat face problem. Just play with shadows and highlights to bring out the contour of your face. It’s like digital contouring – use darker and lighter shades to accentuate your bone structure and make your face three-dimensional.
5. Apply a Light Filter
And no, we are not talking about beautification filters. This tip is about artistic effects. After all, even the most perfect headshot sometimes lacks a finishing touch. And a wisely chosen filter can be that final touch. With a filter, you can stylize your photo, so that it would go far beyond being a simple selfie into the realm of art. And who wouldn’t want that to be said about their portrait? So look for beautiful filters and make good use of them.
Well, these seem like quite doable things, right? But how can you actually do them? The answer’s simple – you need a proper photo editor for that. There are countless options on the market, all ranging in price, accessibility, and toolkit.
One of the indisputable leaders of retouching software is Lightroom. This Adobe product is almost as powerful as Photoshop and allows you to retouch your portrait like a pro. However, a rich and effective toolkit comes at a price, since Lightroom sports a quite confusing interface and is really pricey.
Another option is PhotoDiva. This free portrait retoucher offers automatic and manual – and very-natural looking – editing. With PhotoDiva, you can get rid of blemishes, smooth out the skin, apply makeup, and even sculpt your face with a few clicks and slider drags.
And finally, there is AirBrush – an easy-to-use mobile application for iOS. With it, you can perfect your selfies right on the go – erase acne and wrinkles, even out the skin, and reshape your face. However, keep in mind that this app now has a subscription distribution model.
As you can see, a perfect headshot is just a few precise edits away. So take our tips and put them to good use. Turn yourself into a bona fide model and make your portraits shine!
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